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Brain candy for Happy MutantsTue, 03 Mar 2015 23:10:23 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1World War 3 Illustrated: prescient outrage from the dawn of the Piketty apocalypsehttp://boingboing.net/2015/02/26/world-war-3-illustrated-presc.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/02/26/world-war-3-illustrated-presc.html#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 14:07:20 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=367387World War 3 Illustrated: 1979–2014, a 300+ page, hardcover volume financed by an oversubscribed Kickstarter collects and thematically groups the very best of more than 30 years of visually stunning, blood-boiling graphic outrage and calls-to-arms. World War 3 has featured some of comix's greatest underground talents, from Peter Bagge and Art Spiegelman to Sue Coe and Sabrina Jones, not to mention Fly, Spain Rodriguez, and many more, and their work for WW3 was always their rawest, most unrestrained material.

I got my copy through the kickstarter, and have only gotten to it now because it is so huge and deliciously well-made that it had to wait until I could sit down with it at the office -- at 3lbs, it was too heavy to contemplate reading on the road or even on the bus. But I had a couple hours free yesterday and I dived into this, and when I came up for air, I wanted to burn something down.

It's hard to recall, from this remove, how hard-fought the slide into corporatist dystopia has been. We didn't just wake up one morning with the expectation that only the richest would be able to avoid penury in their old age, that bank czars would launder billions for drug-lords and get off scot-free while the poor were packed into prison in unprecedented numbers on bullshit drug charges, that the war on terror would see Americans torturing their "enemies" in "black sites" abroad and in Chicago, that we would submit to total surveillance, to the elimination of due process, to the checkpoints for people driving while brown and legalized theft in the guise of civil forfeiture, impunity for rapists and no-knock SWAT murders as part of daily life.

But at every turn, people have fought. Brave, crazy, hopeless or crazed with hope, they fought. And World War 3 was there, its artists shouting out every time the authoritarian state palmed another card, sometimes getting arrested themselves. World War 3 is a genuinely radical publication, and it is also radicalizing. Reading it should make you furious, and hopeful, and determined to do something.

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century marks the Reagan years as a turning point: the moment at which the scattered fortunes of two world wars reconverged into great masses of extreme wealth, exerting terrible, constant gravity on policy, dismantling anything that stood in the way of the creation of multi-generational dynasties of the feudal hyper-rich whose interests were first and foremost in government priorities. Since then -- through the whole WW3 era -- we've seen the dismantling of tenant protections, labor protections, progressive taxation, public schools and public health. Even the justice system and the prisons have been privatized. There is no more moving record of this period than the one you'll find in these pages.

Also of note is Bill Ayers's introduction, which contains all the fire and passion of his other graphic novel work, and will send you to the barricades.

http://boingboing.net/2015/02/26/world-war-3-illustrated-presc.html/feed0The Sculptor: Scott McCloud's magnum opus (about magnum opuses)http://boingboing.net/2015/02/03/the-sculptor-scott-mcclouds-2.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/02/03/the-sculptor-scott-mcclouds-2.html#commentsTue, 03 Feb 2015 13:06:27 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=339074Understanding Comics. But the other McCloud, of superhero comics like ZOT! is equally beloved by the cognoscenti. With The Sculptor, McCloud reminds us that he is one of the field's great storytellers, with a story of love, art, madness and death that wrenches, delights and confounds.
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David Smith is a sculptor who almost made it: he moved to New York, found a wealthy patron, began flying high -- then crashed and burned after his patron destroyed his reputation and career in retaliation for a blunt, even cruel interview with an arts newspaper. Now Smith is barely hanging on by his fingertips, about to lose his apartment, out of money, and about to break the promises he made to himself -- and his dead father -- no make a name for himself, without taking any handouts, in New York City, or die trying.

That's when David runs into his beloved uncle, who joins him at a table at the diner where he's drowning his sorrows and gives him the sketchbook he'd kept as a small boy, a sketchbook David could swear he burned years ago -- and as he pages through it in delight, he realizes that the last time he saw his uncle was...at his uncle's funeral.

In fact, David's not eating with his uncle. He's eating with a walking avatar of death, and death has a bargain for him. David will be able to sculpt the pieces he has lurking in his soul, to become known and make his mark, but in 200 days, death will come for him.

This is the setup for The Sculptor, and the 200 days provide a tense countdown to a ticking bomb, driving the story at a pace that never slows down to anything less than a dead run.

But the speed is just the engine driving The Sculptor and what's really interesting is the freight that it pulls.

Because this is a book that is a look at the paradoxical drives that make us want to create and how it relates to love. David's desire to make art is uncompromising, selfish, wonderful, and totally destructive. The art he makes is both a gift to those he loves and a thing he takes from them, because even when he meets his heart's true love, his need for artistic posterity rivals his ardor for the love of his life.

This is a book full of warm, complicated, difficult relationships, full of drive and vision, full of brutal honesty and difficult choices.

And what's more, it's beautiful. Scott McCloud taught me how to understand the way that the composition of pages in comics can affect pace, mood, and characterization, and it turns out that being great at explaining that stuff is part and parcel of being great at deploying it. Especially in the last third of the book, as it nears its climax, the melding of the illustration, layout and words whips the pace up to a pitch that rivals anything I've ever read.

This is a wonderful book, an instant classic, full of complicated and hard ideas made deceptively simple and dangerously elegant by dint of a full mastery of the comics medium. It was years in the making, and well worth the wait.

-Cory Doctorow]]>

http://boingboing.net/2015/02/03/the-sculptor-scott-mcclouds-2.html/feed0The Graphic Canon of Children’s Literaturehttp://boingboing.net/2015/01/22/the-graphic-canon-of-children.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/01/22/the-graphic-canon-of-children.html#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 19:01:50 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=359732Imagine Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer told in Family Circus comic strip style, Alice in Wonderland’s Alice as a rude fat brat with a Valley-girl accent, Little Red Riding Hood as a young woman who climbs into bed with the Wolf, or Harry Potter told as a comic without words, except for some exclamations and sound affects.]]>Imagine Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer told in Family Circus comic strip style, Alice in Wonderland’s Alice as a rude fat brat with a Valley-girl accent, Little Red Riding Hood as a young woman who climbs into bed with the Wolf, or Harry Potter told as a comic without words, except for some exclamations and sound affects. Although these mega-popular “children’s” stories have already been recreated by illustrators, artists and filmmakers throughout the years, Graphic Canon presents them and 46 others with a fresh and twisted take by contemporary artists such as Dame Darcy, Lucy Knisely, Roberta Gregory, and World War 3’s Peter Kuper. From Aesop fables and Brothers Grimm tales to The Little Mermaid, Mark Twain’s “Advice to Little Girls,” The Oz series and Watership Down, this fourth volume of Graphic Canon brings us household children’s literature as we’ve never seen it before. This book of children’s literature might not be suitable for children! I would rate it PG-13.

http://boingboing.net/2015/01/22/the-graphic-canon-of-children.html/feed0Preview of Henni, by Miss Lasko-Grosshttp://boingboing.net/2015/01/06/preview-of-henni-by-miss-lask.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/01/06/preview-of-henni-by-miss-lask.html#commentsTue, 06 Jan 2015 12:00:42 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=356599Striking out on her own, Henni goes out in search of truth, adventure, and more. Written and drawn my Miss Lasko-Gross (A Mess of Everything and Escape From Special), Henni is a commentary on religion, coming of age, and being yourself.

In 1998, New Zealand cartoonist Dylan Horrocks wrote a 250-page graphic novel called Hicksville, about a comic book artist and a journalist writing a biography of the artist.

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In 1998, New Zealand cartoonist Dylan Horrocks wrote a 250-page graphic novel called Hicksville, about a comic book artist and a journalist writing a biography of the artist. The Comics Journal awarded it “Book of the Year.” I loved it (here’s my review). Now, 17 years later, Horrocks has released his second graphic novel, called Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen. Like Hicksville, it’s about comic book artists and the allure of comic books. And also like Hicksville, it, too, is worthy of an award.

The story begins with a frustrated Kiwi cartoonist named Sam Zabel. He used to loved self-publishing comic books, but is now stuck writing stories for a major comics publisher and not having any fun. He’s got a bad case of writer’s block, and is depressed. One day, while visiting a used book store, Zabel stumbles on a 1950s science fiction comic that magically sucks him into an Edgar Rice Burroughs-like version of Mars, which is populated by a harem of naked green-skinned alien women who welcome him as their hero-husband and want to make him the star of their orgy.

After sort-of-but-not-really resisting their advances he explores his strange new environment, meeting other humans and comic book characters who, like him, are trapped in a universe that blends fiction and reality, jumping from one comic-book genre to another. As Zabel travels through these alternate worlds, he comes to terms with the reasons why comic books appeal to him, and the joys and hazards of disappearing down the rabbit hole of fantasy.

One of my favorite comic book series in recent years is Viktor Kalvachev’s Blue Estate, a hardboiled crime series that takes place in modern day Los Angeles.

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One of my favorite comic book series in recent years is Viktor Kalvachev’s Blue Estate, a hardboiled crime series that takes place in modern day Los Angeles. It’s got a sleazy action hero actor with a passing resemblance to Steven Seagal, the Russian Mafia, the Italian Mafia, a geeky fanboy private eye in his 40s, a B-movie actress, drugs, alcohol, strippers, hookers, and seedy establishments.

It’s dirty and gritty and a lot of fun, in an LA Confidential way. The series has been anthologized into a fat hardbound book that includes bonus material, such as photos of the little clay heads of the main characters that Kalvachev made to serve as reference for the artists who worked on the videogame version of Blue Estate. If you missed the comics the first time they came around, this Anthology is a great way to catch up on what Comicbuzz.com called “one of the best comics on the racks today, not to mention one of the best crime comics ever.”

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/15/blue-estate-a-dirty-gritty.html/feed0Here is Richard McGuire's epic of timehttp://boingboing.net/2014/12/11/here-is-richard-mcguires-epi.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/12/11/here-is-richard-mcguires-epi.html#commentsThu, 11 Dec 2014 10:00:32 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=352658Here, the past, present and a vividly imagined future are all set in the same specific location. By Patrick Lohier.]]>Richard McGuire is a jack of many trades. He's a musician, a toy designer, a children's book author, an illustrator and animator. He's a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times. He's created animated shorts that subvert our sense of light by playing with negative space, a puzzle made of almost identical pieces, a number of children's books, including one about the disparate adventures of 14 different oranges (some have unhappy fates), and more.

In 1989, a 36-panel comic by McGuire appeared in Raw Magazine, volume 2, issue 1. The comic centered on an idea or whimsy that might strike anyone at any moment: what might have happened here, in this very spot, in the past and what might happen here in the future?

Among a vanguard of cartoonists and illustrators, the comic, aptly named Here, had the impact of an elegant and groundbreaking theorem. In the years that followed, admirers grasped that McGuire's short work, with its straightforward black and white drawings, was a brilliant meditation on time, impermanence, metamorphosis and mortality.

Chris Ware said of that strip, “[McGuire] revolutionized the narrative possibilities of comic strips. I think he's a genius and what he gave every reader with Here was an individual and unique way of looking at life, and additionally (to this cartoonist at least) it was life-changing.”

Twenty-five years later, Pantheon Books is publishing McGuire's new book and an e-book, also called Here. The new work has provoked much fanfare, including a seven-week-long special exhibition in early fall titled, “From Here to Here: Richard McGuire Makes a Book” at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.

The 300-plus page book extends the idea of his short 1989 work, reinvents the concept and gives it vibrant new life in curious, software-manipulated watercolors. Like that earlier, shorter work, Here scans back and forth across billions of years – millennia, centuries, years and even intervals of only seconds pass. But past, present and a vividly imagined future are all set in the same specific spot.

The fulcrum of the book is a corner in the living room of a 20th-century house in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. We see the house's inhabitants, including McGuire's family in the ’60s and ’70s, and we also see untouched forests and primordial wastes that spanned there eons ago, dinosaurs, swamps, forests, Lenape Indians, Dutch traders, colonists, and other past inhabitants of the region, people in years to come, apocalyptic scenes in the near and far-distant future and more.

The experience bends the mind. My initial reaction was tentative, even puzzled. But I soon found myself immersed and often moved. Here has the surprising depth of a magician's top hat. The combination of the surreal and the nostalgic are mesmerizing. The book is an ingenious epic of time and space, and I think readers everywhere, and of many ages, will find it delightful.

I had a chance to talk with Richard McGuire a few weeks before the book's scheduled publication in early December. I was eager to find out about the vision and inspiration behind his unique book, its transformation from the short 1989 comic, and the extensive research he undertook to give it a solid foundation in billions of years of history and fact.

McGuire has lived in Greenwich Village since his early 20s, when he graduated from Rutgers. I reached him there, while he was enjoying his morning coffee. I started out by asking him about the aspects of the book that appear to be based on his family.

"Well, in the first [1989] version my brother was the focus, and at the time I was only 30 and he was about 32, and then I had him growing old and that was kind of funny at the time. But my parents have since passed away, and they're kind of the main focus of it now. That was kind of a nod to them, because my parents and my oldest sister Mary, who is in the book too, she passed away around the same time of cancer. That's sort of a dark time. It was more my parents' story because they bought the house and it was their house and they had lived there right till the end.

"It ended up by default having my family in it. It was never meant to be a story about my growing up as much as it was just about time. Then I got all this source material and family photos. There are little personal moments in it.

"I felt I had to give it depth and I had to do a lot of research about that area, but this is where it gets sort of tricky, because the book has such a wider scope. Of course it has some personal stuff in it. In the middle of working on the book we were closing the house and selling it. So I took all these photographs. Going over all this stuff you start to find all sorts of great, little casual moments. But it was never in a specific place because I wanted it to feel like just any place. It's not the history, it's like a tiny history. It's working on both levels."

I asked McGuire how his family and siblings feel about the book.

"They got a kick out of it. I mean my whole family does, my extended family and everyone was excited to see it. I threw a lot of people in there that I know. There're even people who worked on the book in there. I mean I tried to make it really inclusive of everybody."

One of the ways in which I think the book is very successful is that it put me through a lot of different moods: nostalgia or wonder or fear or anxiety. I asked McGuire if working on the book was an emotional experience.

"Well, going through the closing of the house was definitely an emotional thing. But you know this isn't a one-to-one connection to my house. I mean, if you looked at my living room it doesn't look at all like this particular living room. There're some elements that are the same, but . . . I was concerned about having the book have an emotional vibe. What I was mainly worried about was whether, without having a protagonist, would you feel any emotion without being taken through someone's story?

"I had a lot of people giving me feedback and they had been touched by it. I was hoping to get something in there. There's a scene where you see I'm with my dad, and my dad was really going downhill at one point and all that stuff was really hard to go through. I think going through all those family photos and especially after my parents passed away and my sister, it was a cathartic thing to go look at all that stuff. And I ended up having a lot of opinions about time, because they were always on my mind while I was working on the book.

"There's even a scene where you see these two guys and they're in the future and they're looking at these panels that are floating in the air and one of them sticks their head in the panel and becomes the younger version of themselves.

"That came from a dream I had where I was in the house and I was walking around and I see my mom and I asked if Mary was around which was my sister. And then she says, 'Oh, she'll be here soon.' And then I looked out the window and I saw a younger version of Mary like a teenage person. And I opened the window and I stuck my head out to call to her and then I realized I was younger because I suddenly had all this hair in my face. I had long hair when I was a teenager. And then I woke up and I remembered thinking, 'That was amazing!' I stuck my head through that window and I became a younger version. So then I tried to work that into the book.

I asked McGuire if he enjoyed the process of researching and finding out about the geologic, natural and human history of the region.

"It was a lot of fun doing the research. It was about a year of research. I got a fellowship at the New York Public Library and that really helped a lot. I had signed that contract [with Pantheon] years before and I'm glad I didn't do the book then. It would have been a totally different book. Having had the experience of my parents passing and then a sibling passing and then the idea of leaving the house . . . All those issues made it a deeper experience.

"But I think that and having the time to spend doing the research of the area and all that stuff made it a better book. And then it was about, I'd say, a year and a half of doing the artwork. Because I wasn't doing any of the artwork when I was doing the research. I mean I did a little bit, but I feel like every project I do, I feel I have to kind of find a way in. Because if you look at the other work I've done I can stretch my style in different ways. It's not like I have one way of working. And that was a big struggle for me, just to try and find the right way to go back into the book because I didn't want the book to just be the way it looked originally. I wasn't planning on just adding pages to the original. I always felt I had to kind of find a way to reinvent it. And I was doing experiments with water color and vector art and trying to find the balance."

While I was reading the book, I noticed the familiar face of Ben Franklin. Having grown up in Philadelphia, the face that adorns the $100 bill is as familiar as a beloved old uncle's. After doing some of my own research I discovered that a historic house, called the Proprietary House, that features prominently in Here, stands across the street from the book's focal living room. The house had served as the residence of New Jersey's colonial-era Royal Governor – William Franklin, Ben Franklin's estranged son. I asked McGuire about the cameo.

"I didn't want to announce him. I don't know if you read anything . . . But, yeah, it really did happen and then I found out more in research. That house is actually even closer than I show in the book. It's really directly right across the street from where I grew up. But I never really knew the whole scoop of what was going on over there. I just knew that Ben Franklin had something to do with the place. And then when I did the research I found out that it was his son who lived there, who was a Loyalist.

"Ben and him were really close growing up, but over the years they went their separate ways politically. Ben went there to kind of talk sense into him. And [William] ended up being arrested when the Revolution happened. And I think that was possibly the last time they ever saw each other, that confrontation. Because I read as many letters as I could about that situation. But I didn't want that to be such a big focus of the book because everything in the book is just passing through. It's hilarious to have this like celebrity. But everyone has their little walk around the park.

"I had this motto working on the book, and that was, 'Make everything big, small and make everything small, big'. And so the idea of that moment was to reduce it to just an argument between a father and a son. It was trying to boil it down."

The scenes between Ben and William Franklin are brief, but a quote ascribed to Benjamin Franklin seemed to me to aptly convey the themes and circularity of the book. Franklin says, "Life has a flair for rhyming events." I asked McGuire what the quote means to him?

"Well I'm always fascinated by those kind of loops that happen. This happens so repeatedly in life, things swing around. It happens to everyone, I suppose. In that particular case [Ben Franklin] really did come to the town when he was 15 and he really did come back when he was much older with his 15-year-old grandson in tow.

"It happens to me all the time. I did this strip, how long ago? Twenty-five years ago, and 10 years after that I thought I should do it as a book, and I signed the contract with Pantheon right around, I guess, '98 or '99 or something like that. I know it was before Chris Ware's book, Jimmy Corrigan. And I think Chris was the one who told me about Pantheon, and then I signed the contract, and then I ended up getting side tracked.

"It's like my music. Me and my band, my music has been reissued repeatedly over the years, going around in circles. When it was reissued the last time we ended up playing all these big shows and it's just strange. I keep putting things down and they keep circling around. My toys are being reissued now. So it just seems like everything's looping around."

I had received a beta version of the e-book version of Here. I asked McGuire about the process of making a digital version of the book.

"Well that was a really important thing too about the reinvention of the whole project. When I knew I wanted to go back into the book I definitely wanted to do it as an interactive thing because it seemed so perfect for that.

"I was in London giving a lecture about my work and I touched on the project. At that point I was doing the research. And I said that I wanted to try to do an interactive version and there was a guy in the audience, that was Stephen Betts, who's a program art developer. He's also a huge fan of the original. He wrote me and sent me a little model that he did, taking the original story and just making a little kind of thing where you can move within it.

"He said he was planning on moving to New York. So when he got here we worked on it for about two years together. We went through a lot of changes, and now we have the 1.0 version which is going to be launched when the book happens. It really does explode the book. If you click on the date in the upper left hand corner, it starts to shuffle the pages. You're not just looking at it as a book anymore.

"It was another one of these things where I didn't want to spell it out. Because everybody who sees it at first thinks the e-book resembles the book version. But if you play with it long enough, you start to click on the dates and the panels and that's enough of a clue that once you click on that one date in the upper left hand corner, it starts to open up the shuffling mechanism, and that's still surprising to me.

"Also, if you touch the panels themselves, sometimes you can follow a thread. Like when the artist and the model are talking [a narrative thread in the book], if you just want to read that, you just touch the panels and you can continue through that thread. Because some of the panels are stacked so they work as threads.

"It's the reshuffling of it that is the most exciting thing for me. I mean, I'm still surprised there are so many combinations. I was thinking about this the other day. I've never counted all the panels in the book, but I was thinking about just the normal card deck of 52 cards and that always seems like an endless variety of possibilities. So I was thinking, 'My god, I never calculated it but there must be an immense number of combinations that can happen.' And sometimes, I start to see patterns of things that I didn't intend that just happen.

"There's actually a lot of stuff you start to see in the e-book that's covered up in the book. Because when the panel is removed sometimes there's stuff underneath that you would never get to see otherwise. And we're also introducing animation."

I told McGuire that I was surprised to stumble on the animation of a cat walking across a panel.

"Yeah there're a few things like that in this version. I want them to be more of a surprise then to be like a bad animated film or something. The fire in the fireplace is one of the things. And then there's a breeze that comes through the window and the curtain moves. Somebody turns the page of a book and things like that, just small things. But they don't happen every time. They're really tiny events."

I had read in my own research that McGuire's original strip in 1989 was partly influenced by the Microsoft Windows operating system. I asked him about that.

"Yeah, well, I took a lecture series with [Art] Spiegelman and he was talking about comic diagrams and I think that started my thoughts on it. Then I tried to do a story where it was split down the center and that's why I did the corner of a room to begin with, cause I split the screen and I wanted half the room to be going forward in time and half the room to be going backward in time. And I was showing that to a friend and this friend had just got the Windows program and started explaining how that worked. And that's when it hit me. I was like, 'Oh, I can have multiple views of time . . .' So it really was that. That was the trigger."

I mentioned that McGuire's description of that eureka moment reminded me of his enthusiasm for the e-book project, and brought to mind what we'd discussed earlier, about life's flair for rhyming events.

"Exactly, exactly. It's going right back to the original idea. It really is. And it's a full circle thing of being able to introduce it as that. But you know there were a lot of elements. I was thinking about this, about how my dad used to take pictures of us always in the same location every year. I show a sampling of those in the book. And I think that had a lot to do with me thinking about time and space. Because I grew up with those photographs every year. I think that that had something to do with it."

I asked McGuire about the process behind the distinctive artwork, which look like old, digitally manipulated photos or photorealistic illustrations, enhanced with watercolors. What method did he use? Where did he work?

"I had a studio in Brooklyn. I'm just closing that out now that the book is done. I'm moving to a new place, because I just wanted to start fresh. I was struggling at the beginning and I was just doing all these experiments and then I was trying all these different styles, different techniques. And then at one point I started just collaging it together and felt that it looked okay and I was kind of surprised. It kind of works in that scrapbook kind of way, where it somehow is signified in the end. And also I think it's kind of nice to have some things that are softer because it kind of changes your focus on things.
"I wasn't planning. Some of those things that ended up in the book were like sketches that I never thought would be finishes for the book, but I kind of liked the speed at which these things were done. Some are slow and some are fast. So there's the idea that even that is time based in the execution. I started to think that that's just another factor of the book, to have that, and to allow that to happen. But I wasn't planning on it in the beginning. It was one of those things that just evolved. And then a lot of the unifying things, I guess, masking . . . a lot of the work was done by hand and put into the computer and then colored in the computer. But some things are not. Some things are more colors and then enhanced with Photoshop.

"In the very, very, very beginning, I thought at the end of the book I would have all these beautiful paintings, and it didn't work out that way at all. It really was totally created in the computer and it had to be because I was going to do the e-book. I knew everything had to be not locked down. I couldn't have finished paintings of these spreads. All the elements had to always remain open and free to be shuffled. I knew that from the start. So the book is the finished art. That's the way I've always talked about it too.

"One of the things that was a big influence on me and that I was looking at were all these Japanese wood block books. There's all of this preparation and the final book is the finished book."

I asked McGuire if he has plans for another book.

"I do have stuff that I've been kind of working on and putting away that I want to get back to, a few different projects. I'm going to do an exhibition in Paris in January. I'm going to do some paintings of panels in the book, and then I'm going to paint them life sized so, like, the window will be a window-sized painting. I'm going to probably do, I don't know, maybe 10 to 20 paintings, separate standalone paintings so that the show will be half like the Morgan show and then the other half will be the paintings. And then, in the middle, there will be a projected thing of the e-book, somebody playing like a full screen thing of the e-book with reconfigurations."

Knowing how many creative hats he wears, I asked McGuire how he balances all of the different fields and projects he's engaged in.

"I feel like it's very organic how everything just happened to come up and then circle back. When I was first starting out I just thought I was going to be an artist and that's all, and then I came to New York – well, actually before I came to New York I put the band together. And I was working at all these galleries and bringing up my own artwork. But then it kind of ran its course. I did a few comics, then went on to doing kids' books, kids' books led to doing animation, but I was involved with animation before that. Then the kids' books got reprinted, and the toys are being redone. The music is going to be reissued again. This will be the third time it's been repackaged. It's coming out in the spring."

At the end of our conversation I confess to McGuire that I was a little nervous before I contacted him, somewhat awed by the fact that he's behind the bassline for Liquid Liquid's 1983 classic, "Cavern." I also ask him what's in store for the rest of his Sunday.

[Laughing] "Before this book came out I was thinking, 'Well at least now I've got the book that people will remember instead of, 'he's the guy who did that . . .' I've got to move out of my studio today, so I've got to go rent a car and this is going to be a day of schlepping stuff."

Note that Richard McGuire’s quotes have been edited for length and clarity. ]]>

Picking up six years after The Hive left off, former performance artist and ne’er-do-well Doug still finds himself trapped part-time in a dystopian world (his alter ego) of green worm-like creatures in which his covert visit to his “breeder” girlfriend ends in a grotesque revelation as to her true purpose. As in the first two books, he is also trapped part-time in the here and now, where his obsessive thoughts about his troubled past, and especially about his ex-girlfriend Sarah, keep him from moving forward with his present girlfriend – and his life. Truths about Doug’s cowardly character are unveiled in this book that reveal many of the mysteries that came with the first two books, and by the end of Sugar Skull, I was uttering my first “Aha!” before opening up X’ed Out to begin the trilogy again.

The Wrenchies is one of the most intense, dizzying, and labyrinthian graphic novels I’ve ever encountered. I’m still not exactly sure what I just read.

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The Wrenchies is one of the most intense, dizzying, and labyrinthian graphic novels I’ve ever encountered. I’m still not exactly sure what I just read. But I liked it.

It’s hard to describe The Wrenchies. It’s a gorgeously drawn and colored 304-page graphic novel that takes place in several time periods (including a post-apocalyptic, post-adult future). The Wrenchies is a comic book within the comic book, about a group of young crusaders out to save the world. And there are the future Wrenchies and the original Wrenchies that are actually the Wrenchies from the comic book within the comic book. Confused yet? There are also wizards and magic, dark elf energy vampire zombie thingies that are filled with bugs, aliens from Proxima Centauri, mad scientists, time-travelers, a future world populated only by kid gangs (one of these gangs being the titular Wrenchies), and a scientist who lives inside of a robotic Golem-like creature. Intrigued yet?

This Lord of the Flies on acid story with Watchmen-like ambitions has so many layers, characters, plot threads, and graphical eyeball kicks on every page that you give up after awhile trying to keep everything straight. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The beautiful and richly detailed art is an absolute delight to drink in. The numerous cutaways of the various underground forts and lairs that the kids live in, the wacky inventions, the fourth-wall-breaking arrow-marked call outs on many of the pages, and the sheer crazed inventiveness of the Wrenchies’ world and its contents are worth the price of admission (and the understandable confusion).

Everything about this book requires your time and attention. We tend to breeze through comic books… er… graphic novels. This really is a 304-page book that needs to read at the pace of a novel, lingering for awhile on every page (and there are many hidden gems to encourage you to do just that). Everyone that reads it (and likes it) says they’re definitely going to read it again. I’m definitely going to read it again.

Although it’s basically a young adult novel (in attitude and subject-matter), it has some disturbing violence and a fair amount of profanity in it. But if you have a YA reader for whom these are not issues, they’ll likely adore this book. And as an adult, if you’re OK with a book that defies easy digestion but rewards deeper engagement, join The Wrenchies on their perilous quest.

I’ve always been fascinated by WWI trench art – objets d’art fashioned from bullet and shell casings and other materials found in the trenches and battlefields of that hellish quagmire.

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I’ve always been fascinated by WWI trench art – objets d’art fashioned from bullet and shell casings and other materials found in the trenches and battlefields of that hellish quagmire. My general interest in WWI military history has also brought me to other artistic expressions of it, like Benjamin Brittens’ War Requiem and the war poetry of Wilfred Owen. Above the Dreamless Dead: World War I in Poetry and Comics was put together by New York Times’ bestselling editor, Chris Duffy. The collection honors the centennial of the “Great War” in a unique way, by combining some of the most celebrated “trench poets” of the time with some of today’s most accomplished cartoonists. The works of such poets as Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen are given the comic strip treatment by Garth Ennis, Peter Kuper, Hannah Berry, Anders Nilsen, Eddie Campbell, and others.

The textual spareness of the comic form really does lend itself to poetry, so it seems a perfect marriage. But I have to admit, while I really enjoyed and was moved by the experience of this book, the disparity between the writing style of early 20th century poetry and modern comic art did seem at odds at times. And as poetry is supposed to be personally-evocative, I thought the pieces that worked best were the ones that kept the art sparse, moody, and not a literal interpretation of the verse. I really enjoyed the soldier’s songs and how they were comically interpreted.

All in all, Above the Dreamless Dead is a very bold and innovative way of re-enlivening this literature in a new way. The poetry is intense, haunting, and sad, the art is top-notch, and the production on this little volume is impeccable. Bravo to First Second, a publisher I get a bigger crush on with each new release.

Megahex, by Simon Hanselmann, is a collection of his Megg and Mogg strips, first featured on his Girl Mountain Tumblr.

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Megahex, by Simon Hanselmann, is a collection of his Megg and Mogg strips, first featured on his Girl Mountain Tumblr. The comic is an existential stoner tale that is part Furry Freak Brothers, part Beavis and Butthead, and part Jean Paul Sartre (with some Jackass thrown in for good measure).

The comic concerns Megg, a green-skinned witch, her familiar/friend, the cigarette and weed puffing black cat, Mogg, and a whack-a-doodle supporting cast: Owl (an anthropomorphized owl), Mike (a warlock), Robot (guess), Booger (a female Boogeyman), and Werewolf Jones (who likes to cheese-grate his scrotum). This bizarre group of friends do little more than sit around, bong-ripping themselves into oblivion, while playing cruel pranks on each other and pontificating on the state of their miserable lives. The witch, warlock, and other horror movie “dress,” at first seems superfluous (the series takes its name and affect from the 70s Meg and Mog comics, about a witch and her cat). But after awhile, it’s obvious that the monstrous nature of the characterization is an outward expression of crippling alienation and how they truly feel about themselves. They are not monsters, they just feel that way.

It would be easy to dismiss Megahex as another stoner comic. But there’s so much lurking beneath the seemingly superficial surfaces – questions about friendship, loyalty, love, drug addiction, sexual identity, and hopelessness. There are plenty of hysterical Darwin Award-worthy situations in Megahex, but that’s not likely to be your takeaway. And what you’ll leave with is far scarier than any spook house frights; the fear of looking deeply at yourself in the mirror and finding a monster (or nothing) in your place.

Note: I love that more publishers are starting to do book tour videos, where an unseen hand pages through the book. You can see one such video for Megahex here.

http://boingboing.net/2014/10/22/megahex-an-occult-dressed-st.html/feed0Cory coming to NYC, LA, SF, SEA, AUS, MSP, ORD!http://boingboing.net/2014/10/06/cory-coming-to-nyc-la-sf-se.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/10/06/cory-coming-to-nyc-la-sf-se.html#commentsMon, 06 Oct 2014 16:00:59 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=336078
A reminder that I'm heading out on tour with In Real Life, the graphic novel I co-created with the wonderful Jen Wang, starting at New York Comic Con this coming weekend.]]>
A reminder that I'm heading out on tour with In Real Life, the graphic novel I co-created with the wonderful Jen Wang, starting at New York Comic Con this coming weekend.

Right after that tour, I'm starting another one for Information Doesn't Want to Be Free, my non-fiction book about earning a living as an artist in the Internet age (with introductions by Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman!) -- all those dates (and more) are on my upcoming appearances page -- I'll be in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco in November, then Ann Arbor, Baltimore and DC!
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http://boingboing.net/2014/10/06/cory-coming-to-nyc-la-sf-se.html/feed0Con/Game: a story from the In Real Life universehttp://boingboing.net/2014/09/30/congame-a-story-from-the-in.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/09/30/congame-a-story-from-the-in.html#commentsTue, 30 Sep 2014 16:09:34 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=334752
To celebrate the imminent release of In Real Life, the graphic novel that Jen Wang and I created from my story "Anda's Game," we've collaborated on a comic about a con game in gamespace, just published on Tor.com.]]>
To celebrate the imminent release of In Real Life, the graphic novel that Jen Wang and I created from my story "Anda's Game," we've collaborated on a comic about a con game in gamespace, just published on Tor.com.

I'd really appreciate it if you'd spread this one around on Twitter and Tumblr and such -- I'm really proud of this book and the comic; it was great to work in some of my favorite tropes from heist and caper stories.

http://boingboing.net/2014/09/30/congame-a-story-from-the-in.html/feed0Excerpt from In Real Life, YA graphic novel about gold farmershttp://boingboing.net/2014/09/15/excerpt-from-in-real-life-ya.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/09/15/excerpt-from-in-real-life-ya.html#commentsMon, 15 Sep 2014 14:30:17 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=331680In Real Life is the book-length graphic novel adapted by Jen Wang from my short story Anda's Game, about a girl who encounters a union organizer working to sign up Chinese gold-farmers in a multiplayer game.]]>In Real Life is the book-length graphic novel adapted by Jen Wang from my short story Anda's Game, about a girl who encounters a union organizer working to sign up Chinese gold-farmers in a multiplayer game.

Tor.com has published a long excerpt from the book, showcasing Jen's wonderful art, character development and writing!

http://boingboing.net/2014/09/15/excerpt-from-in-real-life-ya.html/feed0The ineffable joy of transforming boring scientific explanations into exciting comicshttp://boingboing.net/2014/09/04/the-ineffable-joy-transforming.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/09/04/the-ineffable-joy-transforming.html#commentsThu, 04 Sep 2014 11:00:11 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=327401Jay Hosler's forthcoming young adult graphic novel Last of the Sandwalkers masterfully combines storytelling with science; in this essay, he explains how beautifully comics play into the public understanding of science -- and why that understanding is a matter of urgency for all of us. ]]>
Allow me to spill the beans right at the beginning of this essay.

The answer is comics.

Now, let's consider the question.

Not too long ago a good friend of mine quite publicly declared that he was not interested in the boring scientific explanation for a rainbow. We were in a large group and I was somewhat saddened by this statement, not because I hadn't heard similar sentiments before, but because I heard them so often. It was all the more distressing because I'd spent the last decade writing and drawing a graphic novel about the biology and natural history of beetles called Last of the Sandwalkers. In the wake of this comment, as I prepare for another semester of teaching biology courses and the release of my book in the spring, I find myself in a reflective mood.

Why do I make comics about the natural world? Personally, I love boring scientific explanations, or at least the precise, detailed and often quantitative descriptions I think people mean by boring scientific explanations. The natural world inspires me. Reading about a newly discovered species like the bone-eating snot-flower worm fills me with an expansive sense of the wonder that I want to share. There are the equivalent of aliens living right under our feet and getting to know them enriches our lives. Rest assured, I am self-aware enough to know that going gah-gah over a new textbook is atypical for the population, but if I want to share my enthusiasm with my students and a broader audience I need to ask, "How?"

This isn't a trivial question. A survey of American attitudes suggests that only one in five Americans appreciate the value of scientific inquiry and that students in the United States still perform at or below the level of students in many other developed countries in science and mathematics. In my opinion, Carl Sagan provides the best description of this disastrous situation.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

A democracy with an electorate that doesn't understand science cannot possibly hope to navigate issues like stem cell research or climate change. So, how do we connect potentially curious readers of all ages to the wonders of the universe locked in those "boring" explanations? The answer is obvious (since, y'know, I've already told you):

Comics.

Now, before anyone's head explodes at that gross oversimplification, bear with me. Clearly, the solution to a big challenge like this is multi-variant, but I think comics provide an enormously powerful and entertaining approach to the problem.

At our core, humans are picture-loving, story-telling monkeys and comics plug into a fundamental way in which we explain things to each other. From cave paintings to schematics hastily jotted on a napkin, we use words and images to complete and amplify ideas and explanations. As a cartoonist, I try to harness that power to write graphic novels about science and natural history.

The first is basically transforming a boring, stilted, text-heavy textbook into a boring, stilted, illustration- and text-heavy graphic novel.
The second involves taking advantage of the strengths of the graphic novel format to re-imagine how scientific knowledge can be presented to an interested audience.

I have tried to do that second thing. Science embedded in graphic novels infuses those stories with wonder and mystery. Comic characters that explore the natural world take readers with them. In Last of the Sandwalkers, our intrepid band of beetle scientists discover flying beasts that hunt with sound, escape the clutches of a silken net and endure the embarrassment of sticky, velvet worm mucus. They see a bird for the first time and marvel at this strange creature with a skeleton on the inside of its body.

The acclaimed cartoonist Harvey Pekar once said, "Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures." My first science graphic novel was the biography of a honey bee. Sixteen years later, I still hear from readers about how it changed the way they look at these insects. What was once a terrifying menace to be squished on sight was now a fellow creature with a family and a vital role to play in our world. The words and images of comics can help us feel an emotional connection with a subject and give us a reason to revisit it over and over.

Textbooks can explain science, but comics can make readers care about it.

-Jay Hosler

Nestled in the grass under the big palm tree by the edge of the desert there is an entire civilization--a civilization of beetles. In this bug's paradise, beetles write books, run restaurants, and even do scientific research. But not too much scientific research is allowed by the powerful and elders, who guard a terrible secret about the world outside the shadow of the palm tree.

Lucy is not one to quietly cooperate, however. This tiny field scientist defies the law of her safe but authoritarian home and leads a team of researchers out into the desert. Their mission is to discover something about the greater world...but what lies in wait for them is going to change everything Lucy thought she knew.

Beetles are not the only living creatures in the world.

Deftly combining suspenseful adventure storytelling with the principles and tools of scientific inquiry, entomologist and cartoonist Jay Hosler has created in The Last of the Sandwalkers a tale that satisfies and fascinates even the most bug-averse among us.

]]>http://boingboing.net/2014/09/04/the-ineffable-joy-transforming.html/feed0A strong, self-absorbed female protagonist pushes the boundaries of spacetimehttp://boingboing.net/2014/08/12/interview-bryan-lee-omalley.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/08/12/interview-bryan-lee-omalley.html#commentsTue, 12 Aug 2014 13:15:46 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=320140Leigh Alexander talks to Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan O'Malley about his new book, Seconds, and moving on to a new character--one for whom the imagined burdens of middle age loom large.]]>"The more I speak to cartoonists who are beyond the age of 30, we're all falling apart," Bryan Lee O'Malley tells me on Skype.

Katie, the protagonist of O'Malley's latest graphic novel, is 29. And also falling apart, albeit in a different way: Having had her first major "hit" with a restaurant called Seconds (also the title of the book, of course), Katie's now in a rut. Her second restaurant, the venue of her dreams, is struggling to launch, mired in repairs and lengthy contractor negotiations, and in the wake of a breakup, she's running out of patience, desperately in need of a new success to follow the comfortable first.

In one panel, a drunk Katie wonders if the world ends when she turns 30. It seems like a sincere line of inquiry, despite everything.

O'Malley meant to put out Seconds a year ago, but was delayed by an injury he sustained in 2012, the sort particular to comics folk who live their lives hunched over desks and drawings. "Honestly, I was already pushing the deadline," he says. "After I injured myself I ended up not really being able to draw for, like, six months, and it was really frustrating to have to sit there and not touch it. There were years of accumulated stress on my body from doing this -- bad posture, stuff like that."

O'Malley and I are pals and I have been threatening to psychoanalyze him via Seconds. Not that it seems hard to do, given the premise, and given months and months of following his Instagram feed where hardly a single food picture gets posted without a fan or friend commenting "bread makes you fat," a well-trod Scott Pilgrim reference.

Seconds begins with Katie fatigued of the well-oiled machine, desirous of more ownership and a new challenge. I'm pretty good at this psychoanalysis thing, right?

"Yeah," O'Malley humors me. "It's... yeah, that's in there. It's pretty on the nose. I thought that was a fun thing to have as the basis of this story. I have to explore myself; that's all I can do."

Truthfully, though, he's been nursing the idea for Seconds since finishing work on the first Scott Pilgrim book almost ten years ago. "At times I wanted to take a break from Scott Pilgrim and do this book, but I don't think I was ready," he says. "By the time I got to the point in my life where I was ready to do it, it grew into what it is: I couldn't have done [Seconds] without having done Scott Pilgrim, and it's the logical next step.... in Scott Pilgrim everyone is kind of just starting out, and has their little jobs, but [Katie] has had success, and I wanted to explore that."

Seconds is certainly in many ways a more mature and nuanced book than the Scott Pilgrim series, which overtly borrows video games' heroic vocabulary to tell the story of a self-absorbed slacker winning the heart of an idealized, distant woman by defeating her exes. Katie's painful, unresolved relationship with her ex, Max, is like the dark drumbeat that sounds out a larger fantasy tale: Nothing's going quite right for Katie, but when a fey house spirit leads her to a cache of magic mushrooms growing beneath Seconds, she finds out it's possible to rewrite the past, undo bad decisions -- reload prior saves, if you will -- to try to arrive at the ideal outcome. Can Katie repair her broken history and launch her brand-new restaurant as she dreamed? Or does erasing mistakes instead of learning from them have its own set of consequences?

"The only way I know how to process things is to start writing about them," says O'Malley.

As the story of a small homegrown business and the band of friends that make it work, Seconds has a unique sincerity. It's also refreshing in that it's the story of a spunky, unapologetic young woman entrepreneur, one which hinges in particular on Katie's friendship with her shy employee Hazel. Together Hazel and Katie learn about Seconds' fashionable resident house spirit, Lis, and her role in the mushroom-centric time manipulation magic upon which Katie has greedily stumbled.

"Right after the first Scott Pilgrim I got a job in a restaurant," O'Malley recalls. "I was a food runner, and I only worked there for about four or five months, from kind of late summer to the holidays one year, and... it's not a high-stakes kind of job, but it was interesting to be in that world, and shuttle back and forth between the kitchen and the serving area, and to see all aspects of the restaurant, and to be nobody."

"It suited me," says O'Malley, who is a cautious speaker, fairly reserved in person. "To just be an observer, and be moving things from one place to another. The restaurant itself was this old Toronto restaurant called Kalendar, and the basement of it looks a lot like the basement I drew in Seconds: Checkerboard floor, a mazelike feeling. It stuck with me as a place, and as a metaphor, and I always felt I was going to do a story set in a restaurant."

Where did you get the thing about the house spirits, then, I ask.

"You really don't know?" He says to me skeptically. I can tell from his tone that we're talking about video games, now, which is how we became acquainted.

He means Sierra On-Line's Quest for Glory 4, which I haven't played. "They're adventure games, but with RPG elements," he says. "From what I remember, it was very convoluted... your hero has gone into this Transylvania world, and it's set in this sort of Russian folklore setting. The house spirits were in it, and there's a novel I read around the same time called Rusalka by CJ Cherry, which went into the same kind of lore. I couldn't find much actual information, so I ended up kind of making the rest of it up."

The result is that Seconds nails that same blend of the inventive and the familiar that made Scott Pilgrim such an inviting work. It also prickles the reader with the same sense of watching a car wreck -- although Katie is much more likeable than Scott, you're watching a troubled and periodically-immature person make choices you tend to think are destructive.

"Both Seconds and Scott Pilgrim are about people who are very self-absorbed," O'Malley admits. "We all are, I think. This is about the damage that can do when left unchecked."

Is it a kind of personal inventory, I ask. "Yes and no," he replies. "Katie's not like me, in many ways. I wanted to make someone who was more outgoing and crazy than me, but then, I can explore myself through that too. All these books are about me... it's hard to be specific, but yeah, certainly in the process I would realize very late in the game that certain characters are reflecting certain people in my life, or that things have a direct correlation in my life that aren't intentional."

"Just trying to write fiction, my life leaks in," he adds. "It's a complicated process for me. I feel like I never know what i'm doing, and I'm fumbling in the dark all the time. Every time I do an interview, someone points out something about the book, or about me, that I didn't expect."

Is that weird, I ask.

"No, I kind of like it," he says. "I think it's great. I wish I could even get more of it. I wish I could just hand my book to a psychologist and have them read it and tell me all about myself."

We talk about Katie's relationship with Max and how it ultimately resolves, which I won't spoil, because I love Seconds and I hope everyone reading this will buy it. Seconds is for everyone on the terrifying, bleak precipice of a late-twenties early-thirties crisis, for everyone who even occasionally sits up late at night, gripped by second thoughts, wondering about the nature of adulthood itself and did I do something wrong. Or did I do everything right? Everything?

The book's ending "was my worldview at the time when I was writing it, and what I was hoping for," he says.

Seconds seems unique to me among popular comic books, not just for its female lead and its focus on friendships among young women, but because of the diversity of its cast, the refusal of O'Malley's drawings to conform to any particular 'beauty standard'.

"In the restaurant where I worked everyone was really diverse, but that's something I didn't think about until later," he reflects. "Going through the Scott Pilgrim experience and meeting more and more fans, I... became aware of a certain lack in Scott Pilgrim that was born out of me being 23, 24 years old and the people I knew in my immediate sphere. But I started to feel responsible towards the fans, and the world."

"It felt right for the story to have this female lead," he continues. "And I don't know how good of a job I did, but... I like drawing girls. Not just because 'they're sexy', but I'm interested, and curious, and trying to learn more about people, and that's what drives me."

"It's a little risky [to have unlikeable protagonists]," he acknowledges. "I definitely get feedback that people hate my characters and can't identify with them. I feel like people are not being honest with themselves if that's the case. Daniel Clowes goes much further than I do, even, in terms of his ability to tap into that 'embarrassing horibleness'. I wanted to make adult stress cute, and appealing and energetic."

The fanbase that became acquainted with O'Malley's work through Scott Pilgrim is older now, too, and he hopes they can join him through this next arc of storytelling, even if it's less youthful-action, more 'cute adult stress'.

"I think when I started out, I had a chip on my shoulder about proving I could do 'more' than Scott Pilgrim, something more 'serious-minded' or ambitious," he says. "But then as I wrote it and started drawing it, I think I came to terms, more or less, with Scott Pilgrim existing and being a part of my life forever from now on. I want my teen and 20-something fans to get something out of Seconds, even if they're not quite at Katie's point in life." ]]>

Karl Schroeder's 2006 novel (review) set a new bar for imaginative worldbuilding and exciting adventure sf.

A new graphic novel adaptation from Blind Ferret adds the talents of Jeff Moss, Guy Allen, and Michael Birkhofer to Schroeder's prodigious imagination.

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Karl Schroeder's 2006 novel (review) set a new bar for imaginative worldbuilding and exciting adventure sf.

A new graphic novel adaptation from Blind Ferret adds the talents of Jeff Moss, Guy Allen, and Michael Birkhofer to Schroeder's prodigious imagination. It looks fantastic.

Devoid of gravity, Virga is a massive balloon, three thousand miles in diameter. The humans that exist in this world must build their own fusion suns for warmth and their own spinning "towns" for gravity.

Years ago, the nation of Slipstream came from the clouds and conquered their neighbor, Aerie, destroying their sun and killing the parents of Hayden Griffin. Hayden is bent on revenge, but in Virga, up is often down and Hayden's plan may not go off as he'd hoped. On the brink of war, Hayden's checkered past might just come in handy.

One part steampunk adventure, one part sci-fi epic and one part action spectacular, Virga: Sun of Suns is truly like nothing you've seen before.

Virga: Sun of Suns
]]>http://boingboing.net/2014/07/24/steampunksingularity-mashup.html/feed0Moonhead and the Music Machinehttp://boingboing.net/2014/06/16/moonhead-and-the-music-machine.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/06/16/moonhead-and-the-music-machine.html#commentsMon, 16 Jun 2014 17:04:08 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=311484Moonhead and the Music Machine, a surreal all-ages graphic novel that tells the coming-of-age story of Joey Moonhead, whose head is a moon, and whose freak-flag is just starting to fly. Cory Doctorow reviews a fine, funny and delightful tribute to album rock, outcast liberation, and high school social dominance.]]>Moonhead and the Music Machine is a beautiful and beautifully told all-ages graphic novel from Andrew Rae, published by London's excellent Nobrow Press. It's a surreal parable about Joey Moonhead, a high-school aged kid whose head is a free-floating moon, which has a tendency to drift away when he's distracted. Joey's kind of a loser at school, and his only real friend is Sockets, a brainy girl who's also a social pariah. Both are tormented by the popular, rich kids, and both are adrift in the echoing halls of their school.

But when Joey discovers his parents' stash of classic album-rock on vinyl, he realizes his destiny: he will build a crazy, avante-garde electronic instrument in the school shop and play it in the talent show, winning popularity, fame, and the attentions of the most popular, most beautiful girl in school. His first attempt at this is a bust, but when he meets another freak -- Ghost Boy, who wears a sheet at all times, and who no one ever seems to notice -- the two of them raid a local junkyard for parts and make the ultimate musical instrument.

By the time the talent show rolls around, Joey and Ghost Boy have perfected their set, and alienated poor Sockets. Then Ghost Boy is a no-show at the gig, leaving Joey alone on stage, where he rocks, bringing down the house and transforming the student body into surreal freaks like him. But even though Joey now has the popularity he's craved, his adventures are just getting started.

This is one of those pinkwaterian stories about alienated, weird, creative freaks coming of age in schools that are not nearly so soul-destroying as they believe them to be that I just love. It's a great chapter for a happy mutant bible, with lots of nuance and ambiguity that makes it more than just a tale of Breakfast Club estrangement. Rae makes great use of the surreal touches here, never quite treating the moonhead (and the mutated students) as pure literary devices, nor making them quite literal either. The visual humor and ambiguity are just delightful.

And as this is a book from Nobrow, it is gorgeous, from its endpapers to the spot-inks and textures on the hardcover's boards. Nobrow consistently turns out some of the best and best-made books in the industry and this is no exception.

http://boingboing.net/2014/06/16/moonhead-and-the-music-machine.html/feed0This One Summer [excerpt]http://boingboing.net/2014/05/07/excerpt-jillian-and-mariko-ta.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/05/07/excerpt-jillian-and-mariko-ta.html#commentsWed, 07 May 2014 07:00:43 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=291758Jillian and Mariko Tamaki's brilliant graphic novel.]]>Yesterday, I posted a review of Jillian and Mariko Tamaki's wonderful new young adult graphic novel This One Summer. Today, I'm proud to present an exclusive excerpt from the book, courtesy of the good people at First Second Books. This excerpt really gives a feeling for the rhythm and tone of the story, and showcases Jillian Tamaki's wonderful art.— Cory Doctorow

When a young Cleopatra (yes, THAT Cleopatra) finds a mysterious tablet that zaps her to the far, REALLY far future, she learns of an ancient prophecy that says she is destined to save the galaxy from the tyrannical rule of the evil Xaius Octavian. She enrolls in Yasiro Academy, a high-tech school with classes like algebra, biology, and alien languages (which Cleo could do without), and combat training (which is more Cleo's style). With help from her teacher Khensu, Cleo learns what it takes to be a great leader, while trying to figure out how she's going to get her homework done, make friends, and avoid detention!

http://boingboing.net/2014/05/02/cleopatra-in-space-trailer-fo.html/feed0Winner of the Remix "The Fifth Beatle" giveawayhttp://boingboing.net/2014/04/17/winner-of-the-remix-the-fift.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/04/17/winner-of-the-remix-the-fift.html#commentsThu, 17 Apr 2014 21:58:46 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=298246
I recently reviewed the incredible graphic novel biography, The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story, written by Vivek J. Tiwary and illustrated by Andrew C.]]>
I recently reviewed the incredible graphic novel biography, The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story, written by Vivek J. Tiwary and illustrated by Andrew C. Robinson and Kyle Baker. (It was just nominated for two Eisner awards!)

Last week I announced that Wink (a paper book review website that my wife Carla Sinclair edits) was holding a giveaway of the rare signed, numbered, slipcased "Limited Edition" of The Fifth Beatle, which is limited to 1500 copies, signed by all three creators and comes with an exclusive tip-in page of art. Entrants to the giveaway were asked to write their own text for the word balloons in the panel above. (Clockwise L-R John Lennon, George Harrison, Brian Epstein, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney. NOTE: John has 2 balloons.)

The entries were judged by Vivek J. Tiwary himself, and he selected a winner for the limited edition and a runner-up for a regular edition.

Winner: Frunker

A: okay guys, the show was amazing but I really need a shower. NOW.
B: so put your holy light on the world mighty John and show us the way home!
C: "And God made two great lights, the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night"
D: guys this is actually a van, not a church.
E: so...let there be light!
F: Finally. Thank God.

Runner Up: audiochunk

A: One sweet dream
B: Pick up the bags and get in the limousine
C: Soon we'll be away from here
D: Step on the gas and wipe that tear away
E: One sweet dream came true today
F: Yes it did...

In Hilda and the Black Hound, Hilda and her mom are now living in the big city, and Hilda's become a scout. But scouting and her relationship with her mom are both disrupted by the appearance of a huge, mysterious black hound that terrorizes the town -- and this seems somehow related to the sudden explosion of homeless Nisse -- house spirits who live in the cracks in the walls and behind bookshelves.

Like the other Hilda volumes, Black Hound deals with some important and serious themes, including compassion, fear and independence. And as in the other volumes, these themes are gracefully worked into the storyline in a way that pleases both kids and their grownups, as you can see from my daughter's review, above.
There's just enough scariness in this story to be delicious and thrilling; just enough pathos to make the happy ending shine. The Hilda comics are genuinely great. As with all Flying Eye books, the actual physical object matches the content for craftsmanship and beauty -- an oversized hardcover with heavy pages and beautiful colors.

http://boingboing.net/2014/04/07/my-daughter-poesy-reviews-hild.html/feed0The Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation, a nuanced and moving history of race, slavery and the Civil Warhttp://boingboing.net/2014/04/04/the-gettysburg-address-a-grap.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/04/04/the-gettysburg-address-a-grap.html#commentsFri, 04 Apr 2014 09:30:56 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=295886The Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation sat in my pile for too long, and it shouldn't have. I loved The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation, the previous effort by Jonathan Hennessey and Aaron McConnell, so I should have anticipated how good this new one would be.]]>The Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation sat in my pile for too long, and it shouldn't have. I loved The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation, the previous effort by Jonathan Hennessey and Aaron McConnell, so I should have anticipated how good this new one would be. Having (belatedly) gotten around to it, I can finally tell you that this is an extraordinary, nuanced history of the issues of race and slavery in America, weaving together disparate threads of military, geopolitical, technological, legal, Constitutional, geographic and historical factors that came together to make the Civil War happen at the moment when it occurred, that brought it to an end, and that left African Americans with so little justice in its wake.

Hennessey and McConnell are some of the best nonfiction graphic novelists working. They use the graphic component -- illustrations, composition, layout -- to make a complex story feel comprehensible by a layperson. As a Canadian, I have only a simple understanding of the history of slavery in America, and only the Simpsons episode where Apu is taking a citizenship test and begins to rattle off long explanation for the causes of the Civil War (only to be told by the examiner to "Just say 'slavery'") gave me a sense of the real depths lurking beneath the slavery story.

Which is not to imply that the creators try to downplay the role of slavery in America! Far from it. Rather, since slavery was already an established institution in America at the time of the Civil War, they are investigating what caused that Civil War to break out, then -- and why, for example, the war did not break out again during the Brown v Board of Ed fight.

As the title implies, Gettysburg uses the Gettysburg Address as a framing device for their story, showing how Lincoln's still-familiar short oratory managed to stake ground on issues as diverse as the relative importance of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, theology, theories of government and self-determination, and the role of the state. They don't whitewash Lincoln, either -- his substantial failings as a liberator, egalitarian and beacon of freedom are on vivid display. But while they never excuse him, they go a long way to explaining him in his historical context.

Tellingly, the book treats the story of Gettysburg as still ongoing in our present day, and they trace the threads of race, discrimination, cruelty and greed right up to the 21st century in the final few chapters. Even as a Canadian, I've heard the words of the Gettysburg Address many times -- but I never felt I understood their significance and enduring resonance until I read this book.

http://boingboing.net/2014/04/04/the-gettysburg-address-a-grap.html/feed0Kickstarting Dream Life, a solo comic from Salgood Sam of "Sea of Red" and "Therefore Repent!"http://boingboing.net/2014/03/21/kickstarting-dream-life-a-sol.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/03/21/kickstarting-dream-life-a-sol.html#commentsSat, 22 Mar 2014 00:00:15 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=293591
Salgood Sam -- who worked on great projects like Sea of Red and Therefore, Repent! sez, "In the last leg of a successful Kickstarter to print my next graphic novel, I've set up some unlockable interactive stretch goal rewards you might want to check out to help me make it to the west coast and print more books!]]>

Salgood Sam -- who worked on great projects like Sea of Red and Therefore, Repent! sez, "In the last leg of a successful Kickstarter to print my next graphic novel, I've set up some unlockable interactive stretch goal rewards you might want to check out to help me make it to the west coast and print more books! If you can manage to time your pledges to hit the mark that puts my Kickstarter over one of three stretch goals, I'll draw your deepest darkest dreams for you. Or alternately bright and silly ones are an option."

These “dream sketches” will be reproduced as one of a set of postcards included with physical rewards, so everyone wins! And if your winning pledge includes a copy of Dream Life, I’ll send the original sketch to the lucky backer with the book! Alternately if you go all digital you only need cover the postage to get it.

“Dream Life | a late coming of age” book one is my first long form solo work. An unconventional narrative--what i've been calling neorealist comics. It tells the story of five childhood friends, loosely based off peanuts archetypes, as they confront derailed expectations, reality checks, ethical & physical traumas, and loss. It showcases some richly drawn and hopefully narratively subtle pages, designed to lead you through and show the story in a lyrical fashion.

A labour of love I've been drawing since I finished “Therefore, Repent!” with Jim Munroe in 2007, the project was delayed by the usual grab bag of artists’ banes. Health and economics, etc. I've been chipping away at it committedly if not slowly at times, and posted the work as a webcomic for a while. Earning me two nominations in the Joe Shuster Awards [2013 & 2011]. Completed now, the first book of it anyway, “Dream Life” will be officially Launched at TCAF 2014 in Toronto this coming May, and toured across Canada after--exactly how far depending in part on the success of the Kickstarter!
The Kickstarter campaign ends March 31st.

http://boingboing.net/2014/03/21/kickstarting-dream-life-a-sol.html/feed0Get a signed, inscribed copy of "In Real Life" delivered to your door, courtesy of WORD Bookshttp://boingboing.net/2014/03/13/get-a-signed-inscribed-copy-o.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/03/13/get-a-signed-inscribed-copy-o.html#commentsThu, 13 Mar 2014 13:00:09 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=291958
As previously mentioned, Jen Wang and I have adapted my short story "Anda's Game" as a full-length, young adult graphic novel called "In Real Life," which comes out next October.]]>
As previously mentioned, Jen Wang and I have adapted my short story "Anda's Game" as a full-length, young adult graphic novel called "In Real Life," which comes out next October. Brooklyn's excellent WORD bookstore has generously offered to take pre-orders for signed copies; I'll drop by the store during New York Comic-Con and sign and personalize a copy for you and they'll ship it to you straightaway.
]]>http://boingboing.net/2014/03/13/get-a-signed-inscribed-copy-o.html/feed0Comic book explains why the Transpacific Partnership serves no one but the ultra-richhttp://boingboing.net/2014/02/18/comic-book-explains-why-the-tr.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/02/18/comic-book-explains-why-the-tr.html#commentsTue, 18 Feb 2014 22:09:34 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=288084In 2012 I reviewed Economix, a terrific cartoon history of economics by Michael Goodwin and illustrated by Dan E. Burr.]]>In 2012 I reviewed Economix, a terrific cartoon history of economics by Michael Goodwin and illustrated by Dan E. Burr. (After reading it, I bought a few copies of the book to give as gifts.)

Today, Michael emailed to let me know that he and Dan have posted an excellent and free 27-page online comic called The Transpacific Partnership and "Free Trade," which describes how the negotiated-in-secret treaty is a "global coup that's disabling our democracies and replacing them with multinationals and Wall Street," and is making the US "police state more extensive, more restrictive, and global."
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Isabel Greenberg is a writer and illustrator who lives and works in North London. In her graphic novel The Encyclopedia of Early Earth, Greenberg combines art, mythology, and humor to tell a story of star-crossed love.

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Isabel Greenberg is a writer and illustrator who lives and works in North London. In her graphic novel The Encyclopedia of Early Earth, Greenberg combines art, mythology, and humor to tell a story of star-crossed love. It takes readers back to a time before history began, when another—now forgotten—civilization thrived. The people who roamed Early Earth were much like us: curious, emotional, funny, ambitious, and vulnerable. In this series of illustrated and linked tales, Greenberg chronicles the explorations of a young man as he paddles from his home in the North Pole to the South Pole in search of a missing piece of his soul. There, he meets his true love, but their romance is ill-fated. Early Earth's unusual and finicky polarity means the lovers can never touch.

You can listen to Incredibly Interesting Authors and other Boing Boing podcasts on Swell, a cool streaming smartphone app. Visit swell.am to download the free app.

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http://boingboing.net/2014/01/30/incredibly-interesting-authors-6.html/feed0Snowpiercer: science fiction graphic novel about a train that carries all of Earth's remaining populationhttp://boingboing.net/2014/01/29/snowpiercer-science-fiction-g.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/01/29/snowpiercer-science-fiction-g.html#commentsWed, 29 Jan 2014 18:30:14 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=281518
Titan Comics has released an English translation of Snowpiercer, the acclaimed French graphic novel that inspired the new movie from Joon-ho Bong.]]>
Titan Comics has released an English translation of Snowpiercer, the acclaimed French graphic novel that inspired the new movie from Joon-ho Bong. Volume 1: The Escape was released today (January 29, 2014), with Volume 2: The Explorers following February 25, 2014.

Coursing through an eternal winter, on an icy track wrapped around the frozen planet Earth, there travels Snowpiercer, a train one thousand and one carriages long. From fearsome engine to final car, all surviving human life is here: a complete hierarchy of the society we lost…

The elite, as ever, travel in luxury at the front of the train – but for those in the rear coaches, life is squalid, miserable and short.

Proloff is a refugee from the tail, determined never to go back. In his journey forward through the train, he hopes to reach the mythical engine and, perhaps, find some hope for the future…

The original graphic novels have been adapted into an astounding new film directed by Joon-ho Bong and distributed in the U.S. by The Weinstein Company, and due for release in Q1 2014

http://boingboing.net/2014/01/29/snowpiercer-science-fiction-g.html/feed0Exclusive: Joe Sacco's The Great War, documentary on the creation of an extraordinary graphic historyhttp://boingboing.net/2013/11/07/exclusive-joe-saccos-the-gr.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/11/07/exclusive-joe-saccos-the-gr.html#commentsThu, 07 Nov 2013 16:00:57 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=266813
Joe Sacco is a spectacular political comics creator, and has earned a well-deserved reputation for his work on war and conflict with books on Sarajevo and Bosnia, Gaza and Palestine and other modern militarized zones.]]>

Joe Sacco is a spectacular political comics creator, and has earned a well-deserved reputation for his work on war and conflict with books on Sarajevo and Bosnia, Gaza and Palestine and other modern militarized zones.

But now he's created The Great War, a wordless, gate-folded work on World War One. It's gorgeous and haunting, and beautifully presented in a slipcased hardcover. His publisher, WW Norton, prepared a short documentary on the book and we've got it exclusively (for now). I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

From "the heir to R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman" (Economist) comes a monumental, wordless depiction of the most infamous day of World War I. The Great War is a 24-foot black-and-white drawing printed on heavyweight accordian-fold paper and packaged in a deluxe hardcover slipcase. The set also includes a 16-page booklet featuring an essay about the first day of the Battle of the Somme by Adam Hochschild and original annotations to the drawing by Sacco himself.

http://boingboing.net/2013/11/07/exclusive-joe-saccos-the-gr.html/feed0Ingredients of the Hop Hop Family Tree's coverhttp://boingboing.net/2013/11/04/ingedients-of-the-hop-hop-fami.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/11/04/ingedients-of-the-hop-hop-fami.html#commentsMon, 04 Nov 2013 15:16:55 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=266013Ed Piskor publishes The Hip Hop Family Treeeach week here at BB, and the hardcopy is now available in print from Fantagraphics.]]>Ed Piskor publishes The Hip Hop Family Treeeach week here at BB, and the hardcopy is now available in print from Fantagraphics. At his tumblr, Ed describes the cover's ingredients, a wealth of references to the comics and music he loves.

"2 major strands to my DNA are Hip Hop culture and comic books so this project is the perfect vessel to explore and play in these various sandboxes in tandem, to explore certain similarities between the two worlds, and to merge the cultures under one roof. The format of the Hip Hop Family Tree series is based on the “Marvel Treasury” format, as evidence by the banner across the masthead"]]>